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50This course covers paradigmatic accounts of human nature in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy, through a careful reading of selected primary texts and contemporary commentary. Major topics will include knowledge and opinion; body and soul; immortality, rationality, and freedom of the will; created being and goodness as emanations of divine perfection. The main focus of the discussions will be on the metaphysical foundations of moral value in the pre-modern tradition, and the concept…Read more
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14cannot, cover the broad topic indicated in the title. Rather, it will concern itself only with some preliminary ideas leading the way to a larger project, which, however, should eventually bear an even broader title. As a matter of fact, here I will consider at some length only two authors from the beginning of the period indicated in the title, namely, Aquinas and Siger of Brabant. (Or perhaps three authors, provided the anonymous author of the..
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10Thomas of SuttonIn H. Lagerlund (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, Springer. pp. 1294--1294. 2011.
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60In his admirably clear, beautifully argued study, Claude Panaccio has provided an able defense of Ockham’s position in response to an argument I presented against Ockham in a discussion with Peter King eight years ago at a meeting in Pittsburgh.1 But after eight years, and even after Claude’s book, I still stand by that argument. So, in these comments I will attempt to explain why I think Ockham may still not be off the hook.
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137The Essentialist Nominalism of John BuridanReview of Metaphysics 58 (4). 2005.To many contemporary philosophers, the phrase “essentialist nominalism” may appear to be an oxymoron. After all, essentialism is the doctrine that things come in natural kinds characterized by their essential properties, on account of some common nature or essence they share. But nominalism is precisely the denial of the existence, indeed, the very possibility of such shared essences. Nevertheless, despite the intuitions of such contemporary philosophers,2 John Buridan was not only a thoroughgoi…Read more
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46Conceptual closure in Anselm's proof: reply to Tony RoarkHistory and Philosophy of Logic 24 (2): 131-134. 2003.Let me begin my reply to Professor Roark’s objections in good old scholastic fashion, by a distinction. Philosophical objections can be good in two senses. In the first, trivial sense, a good objection is one that convincingly shows the presence of a genuine error in a position or reasoning. Such objections are useful, but uninspiring. In the second, non-trivial sense, a good philosophical objection broadens and deepens our understanding of the problems at issue, whether or not they manage to re…Read more
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45One often hears extravagant claims made for the Aristotelian doctrine that "what understands and what is understood are the same" De anima iii.4; 430a4). This identity between knower and what is known, or between percipient and what is perceived, is often said to offer a way out of the familiar skeptical arguments against the possibility of our having knowledge of the external world. Typically such claims are made by students of Thomas Aquinas, who in this way seek to render Aquinas's theory of …Read more
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384Indifference vs. Universality of Mental Representation in Ockham, Buridan, and AquinasQuestio. Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 10 (1): 99-110. 2010.This paper argues in the first place that nominalists are right in insisting against ontological realists that semantic universality does not require commitment to universal entities. However, Ockham, in his zeal to get rid of Scotus’s universal entities, swept under the carpet the issue of universal representational content of genuinely universal symbols, conflating it with the mere indifference of the information content of non-distinctive singular representations. Buridan did come up with an …Read more
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43Consequences of a closed, token-based semantics: the case of John BuridanHistory and Philosophy of Logic 25 (2): 95-110. 2004.This paper argues for two principal conclusions about natural language semantics based on John Buridan's considerations concerning the notion of formal consequence, that is, formally valid inference. (1) Natural languages are essentially semantically closed, yet they do not have to be on that account inconsistent. (2) Natural language semantics has to be token based, as a matter of principle. The paper investigates the Buridanian considerations leading to these conclusions, and considers some ob…Read more
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24Ockham's semantics and ontology of the categoriesIn P. V. Spade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, Cambridge University Press. pp. 118--42. 1999.
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20"What can a scholastic do in the 20 th century?" - asks Katalin Vidrányi in the title of her article written in 1970. [1] If her characteristically systematic and pithy analysis can be summarized in a single sentence, the author's answer is this: many things, but not too much.
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79Thomistic “Monism” vs. Cartesian “Dualism”History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 10 92-112. 2007.This paper contrasts the Thomistic and Cartesian interpretations of what the substantial unity of the body and mind can consist in. A detailed discussion of the Thomistic account of the substantial unity of body and soul identifies especially those principles of the presupposed hylomorphist metaphysical background of this account that Descartes abandoned. After arguing for the consistency of the Thomistic view, briefly outlines how certain developments in late-medieval scholasticism prepared the…Read more
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107Aquinas vs. Buridan on Essence and ExistenceIn Lukás Novák, Daniel D. Novotný, Prokop Sousedík & David Svoboda (eds.), Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag. pp. 30-44. 2012.
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131Quine, Wyman, and Buridan: Three approaches to ontological commitmentKorean Journal of Logic 8 (1): 1-22. 2005.This paper provides a comparison of three fundamentally different approaches to the issue of ontological commitment. It argues that despite superficial similarities on either side, Buridan’s approach provides an intriguing third alternative to the two commonly recognized modern approaches.
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Natures: the problem of universalsIn Arthur Stephen McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge companion to medieval philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 196--207. 2003.
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Intentionality |
Semantic Theories |